On the morning of August 27, 1965, a 77-year-old man ignored his doctor's strict orders, walked down to the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and went for a swim. Le Corbusier had been warned repeatedly that his heart could not take the strain. He swam out anyway, as he had done countless mornings on that same stretch of coast, and was found floating face-down in the water shortly afterward. It was, depending on one's perspective, either a tragic accident or the most characteristic exit imaginable for a man who had spent his entire life refusing to be told what he could not do. He had redesigned the modern city, reinvented the house, proposed razing the historic center of Paris to build cruciform towers of glass and steel, and fought with a ferocity and self-belief so total that it alienated patrons, collaborators, and governments on three continents. He died as he had lived: in defiance of limits, on his own terms, in the landscape he loved most. The tributes that followed were global, immediate, and, in several cases, relieved.
Le Corbusier (1887–1965) is the rare figure whose influence on the built environment is so pervasive that it has become effectively invisible, absorbed into the background assumptions of how cities look and how buildings are conceived. Born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in the Swiss watchmaking town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he remade himself with a pseudonym and an almost messianic sense of architectural mission, arriving in Paris in the early 20th century with ideas that would eventually reshape urban living across the globe. His Five Points of Architecture, his Modulor proportional system, his vision of the house as "a machine for living in": these were not merely design principles but philosophical provocations, arguments about the relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit that forced architects, planners, and critics to take sides. Structures like the Villa Savoye and the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille remain among the most studied and argued-over buildings of the modern era, monuments to a vision so forceful it could not be ignored even by those who found it deeply troubling.
The trouble is real and worth taking seriously. Le Corbusier's urban planning ideas, transplanted into the postwar housing projects of Europe and America, contributed to some of the most socially devastating built environments of the 20th century, landscapes of isolation and neglect that bore his fingerprints without his genius. His political sympathies during the Second World War, his flirtations with authoritarian regimes, and his willingness to offer his services to Vichy France cast a long and uncomfortable shadow over the idealism he professed. He was a man of radical contradictions: a champion of democratic housing who designed with aristocratic disdain for the people who would actually live in his buildings, a prophet of the future who was in many ways profoundly of his own complicated historical moment. To understand his legacy honestly requires holding all of it together.
It is that full and unsparing portrait that Nicholas Fox Weber delivers in his definitive biography Le Corbusier: A Life, approaching his subject with the dual perspective of a rigorous scholar and a gifted narrative storyteller. As Executive Director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the author of thirteen books, Weber brings to Le Corbusier an intimate understanding of the modernist world in which he moved, as well as a biographer's sensitivity to the way personal obsession, psychological need, and historical circumstance shape artistic vision. His transatlantic life, divided between Connecticut and Paris, much as Le Corbusier himself bridged European and American modernism, informs a nuanced and deeply researched account of how one man's revolutionary ideas emerged from a very specific biographical and historical context. In this interview, Weber reflects on the genius and the contradictions, the buildings that endure and the ideas that damaged, and why Le Corbusier remains, more than half a century after that final swim, the most indispensable and the most unresolved figure in modern architecture.
Charles Carlini: Your publisher describes your book on Le Corbusier as the "first biography of the man." Why do you think it has taken this long to get a "complete" story of this extraordinary architect?
Nicholas Fox Weber: It would have been impossible to get the complete biography of Le Corbusier during his lifetime; he would have tried to exercise control and spin stories in the way that suited his personal mythology. But I had never known for sure why, before me, no one had tried since his death in 1965. I have to assume it is because Corbu seemed so cold—which, in fact, he was not—and the life seemed so dry—while it was in truth anything but.
CC: Le Corbusier was chiefly known as an architect and urban planner. Yet, he was also an accomplished painter, producing an impressive array of work. Why do you think this aspect of his work has been marginalized?
NFW: Some people take his painting very seriously. And it commands high prices. But I think it has been put in second place quite simply because it is not nearly as good as his architecture. His buildings are without equal and totally original. His painting conjures Léger, Picasso, and others, without being of their standard.
CC: Le Corbusier was a prolific writer with over 50 books and pamphlets to his credit. In fact, Frank Lloyd Wright once remarked about Le Corbusier, "Now that he has finished one building, he'll go write four books about it." Was there a unifying theme that he was aiming to get across through his many writings?
NFW: He was forever saying that he had changed the way human beings lived. He was obsessed by, and wrote time and again about, the need for the ideal human habitation to allow people to live in a community, and, at the same time, to enjoy solitude and their private lives. He was also forever writing about the need for honesty in building.
CC: Le Corbusier's European contemporary, Mies van der Rohe, produced an impressive number of highly regarded buildings in the United States. Yet, Le Corbusier designed only one - The Carpenter Center at Harvard University. Why do you think he produced no commissions in the United States beyond that building?
NFW: Mies moved to the United States. Corbu did not. Moreover, Corbu thought that Americans were essentially unspiritual. But, beyond that, he would have built in the US if Americans had commissioned him; they failed to do so, in spite of his best efforts.
CC: Can you briefly tell us what Le Corbusier's five points of architecture were?
NFW: I would prefer to have readers go to the source and find this in his own language. As a biographer, whenever I can, I present my subject's own voice.
CC: Can you describe Le Corbusier's foray into furniture design?
NFW: This is a complex matter because one will never know how much of his designs for chairs and tables depended on Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand. But the elan and grace of the furniture designs associated with the three of them probably come from his supreme aesthetic instincts—more than anyone else's. The point of the furniture was, as he always wrote to his parents: enjoy life, enjoy the act of looking, allow yourself pleasure and comfort!
CC: Why were Le Corbusier's relations with women so tense and dismissive?
NFW: I don't agree with this description. His lovers remained devoted to him, calling him a man of heart and pleasure. He had a tense relationship with his mother; however, he could rarely please her or get the approval she gave to his brother. But while he had problems with, for example, Eileen Gray, he had a wonderful connection with another woman architect, Pauline Schulman. He could be tense and dismissive with women he didn't like, but warm and comprehending with others.
CC: What was the most revealing aspect of Le Corbusier's life you uncovered during your research for this book?
NFW: That he was a man of immense heart. I suppose it is also fascinating that he was obsessed with sex, which was sometimes a problematic issue for him.
CC: Le Corbusier, a fantastic swimmer all his life, drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean. Some suspected it was a suicide, while others say it was caused by a heart attack. Do we know the true cause of his death?
NFW: Forgive me, but I can only say: please read the book and come to your own conclusions. Corbu's attitudes toward death and the control of one's own destiny are my central issues.
CC: Who among today's architects do you feel are extending Le Corbusier's work?
NFWA: I wish I could name one. The pretenders don't come close.
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